Continuing with the theme of bigger, more complex scenes, the above is I think one of my best work so far, an attempt to model a building on a city street. It’s not really that difficult to model, just that it’s a lot of work to get all of the detail. I used the Archipack add-on for the doors and windows and downloaded the plants from Blendswap. The background is of course a HDRI map but everything else is my own work.

I couldn’t quite figure out what to do for the awning material but the rest turned out rather okay. The most glaring flaw is that there still isn’t enough detail. There’s only so far that you can go with premade textures and eventually you need to texture paint masks and so on to add imperfections, stains, scuffs, tiny cracks and so on to achieve true photorealism, even at this modest view distance. This requires learning a whole new set of 2D art skills and I’m not sure I really want to go into that.

Next is a very simple attempt at a landscape scene, by copying the techniques used by Zacharias Reinhardt to fake a forest using images. This isn’t realistic at all but it made for a good learning exercise and I even learned a bit of compositing to fake the fog. I found it really hard to come up with a fake grass texture for large swathes of ground.

This forest exercise came out of learning to model trees. Here’s the result of one such attempt made from following along a tutorial by CG Geek. I could have done a better job at this as well but I suppose I understand the principle well enough now. It also neatly demonstrates how impossible it would be to create a whole forest of real 3D trees while making me feel like buying the expensive software specialized in growing 3D trees of many species.

Finally here’s something that a bit more artistic and personalized. Darker scenes are great because the darkness helps hide the lack of real detail on textures and shadows provide plenty of visual interest. It’s also an interesting attempt at not being about true photorealism but instead going for a kind of stylized look. Since I had already made most of the assets for other scenes, it was really easy to just throw them together too,